GOP Plans, Denials To Challenge Foreclosed Voters

On GOP Plans and
Denials to Challenge Foreclosed Voters

The “lose your house, lose
your vote” stories out of two battleground states,
Michigan and Ohio continue to occupy space in the media and
various blogs. The story just won’t go away. A federal
lawsuit over the plan is pending in Michigan and the U.S.
Department of Justice is reviewing the matter.

As I
reviewed the stories about this issue and have started to
gather additional information about some questionable
mailings to voters in other states, I was reminded of my
days at the Justice Department when we would investgate
claims of voter intimidation and voter suppression.
Investigations of vote caging and vote suppression schemes
usually started out with an admission of some specific
practice, followed by a denial of any such plan, followed by
a decision to retain legal counsel.

In both Michigan and
Ohio, where the issue of challenging the right to vote of
those who have received foreclosure notices has arisen, GOP
officials did not initially deny there might be such a
strategy. They either admitted it, or acknowledged that it
might be part of a larger strategy aimed at preventing
people from voting who may be ineligible. In other words,
they didn’t rule it out. Once the story came out, and
public outroar ensued, the GOP officials issued vehement
denials.

Let’s look at some of how this story has
developed - it’s easy to see why the story is now in its
third week. It’s also easy to see why those who mount
legal challenges to plans to challenge voters must be
prepared to engage in aggressive discovery if they are going
to obtain the true facts.

To begin with, let’s examine
the context in which these two stories arose. As I detailed
earlier in my primer on the history of vote caging,
the GOP has a long history of engaging in voter suppression
efforts. The Party has persisted with the practice because
it has proven effective. The GOP schemes have also led to
injunctions being imposed by the courts barring specific
voter suppression efforts. If the claims of possible vote
challenges to those who have received foreclosure notices
were against a clean historical slate, then such claims
might be a little hard to believe. But they aren’t. They
arise against a stain of GOP vote suppression extending over
a number of decades. To be sure, claims have been made
against Democratic Party operatives as well: allegations of
paying voters (“walking around money”), voter
impersonation, and non-citizen voting. The point of this
piece is not to go through the accuracies or inaccuracies of
these claims. Instead, this piece is about alleged efforts
to suppress the rights of voters who have lost or are losing
their homes in Michigan and Ohio, and the history of vote
suppression by the GOP which is relevant to this story.

Michigan:

In Michigan, the original story by Eartha Melzer of the
Michigan Messenger contained this passage:

“The
chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan,
a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use
a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in
the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to
challenge some voters on Election Day.

‘We will have a
list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t
voting from those addresses,’ party chairman James
Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview
earlier this week.”

Note that he didn’t
deny talking with Ms. Melzer about the issue and instead
tried to downplay the issue: “We were just having a
conversation,” said Carabelli. Mr. Carabelli then went
even further, making the dubious claim that “[w]e have no
plans to do anything[.]”

Carabelli’s claim that
the Michigan GOP had “no plans” to challenge voters at
the polls was contradicted by a subsequent story in the Michigan
Messenger: “Eric Doster, former counsel for the Michigan
Republican Party and a lawyer who plans to represent GOP
election challengers on Election Day” said that while he
is “unfamiliar with plans to use foreclosure lists to
challenge voters, he does expect party volunteers to
challenge voters in other ways.”

“When asked whether
Michigan Republicans plan to create a challenge list based
on returned direct mail, a practice known as “vote caging,” Doster replied, ‘I
think so. I know this has been done in years past … both
parties may be doing this.’”

One has to wonder why
the Michigan GOP would retain its former counsel for the
State Party to “represent GOP election challengers” if
truly there were “no plans to do anything,” as Mr.
Carabelli had claimed.

The Michigan Messenger stood by
Ms. Melzer’s account that the Michigan GOP did indeed talk
with her about using a foreclosure list to challenge voters,
although the online publication did issue a clarification to
a different part of the original story (re: Ohio).[1]

I was interviewed by Ms. Melzer
for the initial story and I found her to be better informed
than most reporters who call me seeking comment. She was
very well versed in the subject of vote caging and when she
asked me about the comments made by the Michigan GOP
official, she seemed to be reading me her interview notes
from her conversation with him. She asked for my reaction
to the statements she read to me.

I readily admit that I
was not a party to her original conversation with the
Michigan GOP official. But given my interview with her and
what appears to be some inconsistent statements from GOP
officials (along with the history of vote caging and vote
suppression by the GOP), I would be surprised, to say the
least, if the plan of GOP officials in Michigan to challenge
foreclosed voters was entirely fictitious. This is
especially true as I investigate questionable mailings and
tactics by the GOP in several other states (e.g.,
lifelong Democratic voters, Democratic precinct chairs, and
newly registered voters are being sent “Do Not Forward”
letters from the RNC in which it is incorrectly claimed the
voter is either a Republican or has no party affiliation).
Such letters suggest that a massive, possibly nationwide
vote caging effort is underway.

Ohio:

As for Ohio, the
initial story there suggested that an Ohio GOP official
would not rule out the possibility that the party would
challenge voters at the polls stating. Quoting the Franklin
County GOP chairman, the Columbus Dispatch reported that Priesse
“didn't rule out challenges before Nov. 4.”

The latest story this week on possible
efforts to challenge foreclosed voters came from the NY
Times, and contained this passage: “Asked whether his
party planned to use foreclosure information to compile
challenge lists, Robert Bennett, a spokesman for the Ohio
Republican Party, said the party did not discuss its
election strategies in public.” While this is not an
admission that a plan exists to use foreclosure lists to
challenge voters, it sure isn’t a denial either.

Then,
after the NY Times story was published, Mr. Bennett, like
Mr. Carabelli in Michigan, issued a flat denial of any plan
to challenge foreclosed voters: “Mr. Bennett sent an
e-mail message adding that the Ohio Republican Party
condemns ‘any effort to challenge the eligibility of
voters based on home foreclosures.’” Of course he did.
The RNC, which as I noted above has used similar efforts to
suppress voting rights in the past, wants to try and
distance itself from any such despicable plan to challenge
voters who either have lost their homes or may be on the
verge of doing so.

If Mr. Bennett, during his initial
contact with the NY Times, felt that any plan to compile a
list of people whose homes had been foreclosed and then to
challenge their right to vote was a practice to be
condemned, why wouldn’t he say so then? One explanation,
of course, is that at that time he gave his interview, he
didn’t condemn the practice.

I’ve been wondering
this: why would any political campaign or political party
gather a list of names of those who have received a
foreclosure notice. I can see gathering statistics on home
foreclosure so that a candidate or political party can talk
about the current housing and economic woes. But gathering
the names and addresses of those who received a foreclosure
notice? That can have but one purpose when done in the heat
of a campaign: to challenge their right to vote.

One
final thought on all this. Note Mr. Bennett’s denial says
that he condemns “any effort to challenge the eligibility
of voters based on home foreclosures” (emphasis
added). So if the Ohio GOP gathers the names of those who
have received foreclosure notices and then sends each person
on that list a ‘Do Not Forward’ piece of mail, and then
challenges the right to vote of each person whose mail is
returned as undeliverable, will Mr. Bennett still claim that
he is not challenging the right to vote “based on home
foreclosures”? Or will he claim that they are being
challenged based on some other reason, such as an address
change (rather than based on their name on a foreclosure
list)? The reason this story won’t go away is that
it is downright heartless and un-American for any political
party to target people’s right to vote because they have
lost or are about to lose their home. I hope that the GOP
had no such plans. I am not about to accept denials at face
value, especially given the long and extensive history of
the RNC’s vote suppression efforts. I think we need to
wait and see before we reach any final conclusions just yet.

________________________________________

[1] The Messenger put the clarification
this way: Citing an article in the Columbus Dispatch, Melzer had reported
in her story “Lose your house, lose your vote”
that [Douglas] Priesse [chairman of the Franklin County
Republican Party in Columbus, Ohio] had said he had not
ruled out voter challenges due to “foreclosure related
address issues.” In his letter, Priesse said that he had
not stated or implied any such thing.

While the ongoing
dispute in Franklin County does concern voter challenges
that are based, in part, on the eligibility of foreclosed
homeowners, Priesse’s comments to the Dispatch did not
specifically address the issue of foreclosed homeowners.

While most people agree that increased sugar consumption is a major cause of too many New Zealanders being overweight and obese, what we should do about this remains a matter of debate and argument. More>>

Safe to say that no-one, but no-one has had a better 2016 than Vladimir Putin. What an annus mirabilis it has been for him. Somehow, Russia got away with directly interfering in the US election process, such that a friendly oligarch is about to take up residence in the White House, rather than a genuine rival. More>>

ALSO:

We all supposedly agree that the media is going to hell in a tabloid handbasket, but the trends to the contrary can be a bit harder to spot. In his 1970s book The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe had mocked the way the media instinctively acts as what he called The Victorian Gentleman. More>>

Fake news as reality; the inability to navigate the waters in which it swims; a weakness in succumbing to material best treated with a huge pinch of salt. That, we are told, is the new condition of the global information environment. More>>

Post-natal depression is a sly and cruel illness, described by one expert as ‘the thief that steals motherhood’, it creeps up on its victims, hiding behind the stress and exhaustion of being a new parent, catching many women unaware and unprepared. More>>

Here’s a somewhat scary headline from October 30 on Nate Silver’s 538 site, which summed up the statistical factors in play at that point: “The Cubs Have A Smaller Chance Of Winning Than Trump Does” More>>